LadyAda from Adafruit is one of my very favourite people. We have a tradition of spending at least one evening eating Korean barbecue whenever I visit New York. We have told each other many secrets over bowls of fizzy fermented rice beverage, posed for photographs in front of plastic meats, been filmed pointing at electronics for the New York Times, and behaved very badly together in Pinkberry in September. LadyAda is the perfect combination of super-smart hacker, pink hair and business ninja; her cat Mosfet likes to Skype transatlantically with the Raspberry Pi cat, Mooncake (at least I think that their intense ignoring of each other constitutes “liking”); and we are incredibly fortunate that she saw the Pi and instantly understood what we were trying to do back in 2011. Here she is on the cover of the MagPi. (Click the image to visit the MagPi website, where you can download the issue for free.)

All the parts you’ll need to create your own point-and-shoot camera using the Raspberry Pi, a Raspberry Pi camera board, and a little touch-screen TFT add-on board that Adafruit have made especially for the Pi, are available from Adafruit (they ship worldwide and are super-friendly). You can also find out how to send your photos to another computer over WiFi, or using Dropbox. As the Adafruit team says:

This isn’t likely to replace your digital camera (or even phone-cam) anytime soon…it’s a simplistic learning exercise and not a polished consumer item…but as the code is open source, you or others might customize it into something your regular camera can’t do.

Adafruit have been especially prolific this week: we’ll have another project from them to show you in a few days. Thanks to LadyAda, PT, and especially to Phillip Burgess, who engineered this camera project.

I shudder at the thought of the potential “selfies” that will likely result from this. It’s one thing when good-looking celebs make complete fools of themselves, but when us ugly bumpkins turn such technology on ourselves … the only more frightening thought is what Those Darned Cats will be doing with this capability in their paws! :lol:

This project is the most impressive 647 (odd) lines of python I’ve seen in a long time. Amazing amount of functionality packed in there. The slick GUI is written using PyGame, an SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) library wrapper. Very easy to use, and if you’re going to draw your own icons, it’s very easy to adapt for your own use. Well Done, Adafruit! :)

If you did not comment out the lines that set the environment variables for the touchscreen (which it appears that you do not have at the moment), then the error is because it is trying to connect to the device that you do not currently have.